McDonalds Japan Rolls RFID Coupons
McDonalds Japan has announced the deployment of an e-wallet coupon and payment system, using Felica and DoComo iD readers, at 175 locations as of May 20th with the target of all 3,800 retail shops nationwide to be completed by 2009. While the company has been active in the mobile space since 2003, quoting 10 million registered users, this effort was touted as the first of it’s kind during a recent press conference held here in Tokyo.
Some interesting points made in the presentation relate to their concern about the demonstrated cost / benefit of mainstream marketing, specifically televison ads, and the desire to have a finer market segmentation integrated for CRM. However, this loyalty points program only works with the iD reader by DoCoMo, so customers on KDDI and SoftBank Mobile are excluded for the time being, which should have been predictable all things considered over a year ago. We can’t help but wonder how long it will take to extend the offering across all platforms.